Battle Fronts

Anybody interested in a little irony? Remember back a little over two weeks ago when I took over both parking spots by my house because the next-door-neighbors kept taking both spots? Well, the day I did that the neighbors apparently left on some protracted trip. They haven’t been back since. By the time they return they will have no clue why I was pissed, and will probably blame me for being inconsiderate. grumble

And now news from a different battle front. The following is a story of woe and intrigue involving man vs. nature. It tells the tale of a little army of one against a larger army of dozens armed with thousands of landmines. This, friends, is Salamander vs. The Squirrels.

The plot details the travails of one lone woman, armed only with a dandelion puller, who goes out to the garden day after day to remove dozens of baby oak trees from underneath shrubbery, between daffodil bulbs and against foundations. In the early days (four weeks ago), the oak sproutlings were easy to pull. Steady, slow traction would pull sprout, root and acorn out of the ground intact. As the late spring progressed to early summer, more and more acorns exploded into action in the gardens. Slow steady traction no longer always did the trick, and our beleaguered heroine soon discovered that if she failed to get acorn and root out with the sapling then it would simply grow back, with the added difficulty that the new sapling would snap off easily at the precise site that the old sapling snapped, making hand-pulling difficult.

Trowels were called into play, but the resulting holes made the gardens look like the squirrels had mutated into radioactive giants and were destroying huge swathes of garden in an attempt to recover their acorns. Despite due diligence on the part of our intrepid Salamander, more and more acorns continued to sprout. On a bad day, more than twenty neonate oaklings were extracted (with more or less success) from the garden. After four weeks, the appearance of new oaks began to subside, but still not stop.

Making matters worse was that these late sprouters grew more quickly than their compatriots who burst into life early in the season. Even if they were only a few inches tall above ground, their tap roots could go down six or more inches. Making extraction more difficult, the sun burned brightly upon the gardens, with heat indexes of well over one-hundred degrees Fahrenheit. The oak-hatchlings loved it. The Salamander did not.

The body count would indicate that The Imperial Forces of Salamander were winning: Salamander is still standing while hundreds of exploding acorns have been removed from the field of play. But keep in mind that acorns are not the enemy; squirrels are. And so far the only squirrel casualties in this war zone are collateral damage from the road out front. Indeed, the spring litters of squirrels are now adolescents that frolic and cavort as The Salamander makes her daily rounds defusing more acorns.

The Salamander is sure that sometimes, when the sound of traffic abates for a few seconds, she can hear the snickering of squirrels from behind.

I heard on a radio garden talk show that acorns were invented
so that squirrels could be a nuisance.
‘Tis true, ’tis true.